The East path:
A major advocate of an East Path has been Jerry Thomas, who spent years searching areas of the Washougal, at the behest of his mentor SA Ralph Himmelsbach. Himmelsbach is on record as having said in 1976 that he thought DBC jumped somewhere about 12 miles north of Portland, east of V23, based on conversations Ralph had had with co-pilot Bill Rataczak.
In March 2009 'Sluggo' interviewed Ralph Himmelsbach and obtained the following responses, to two key issues:
(a) I then asked him how that chart was produced and who produced it. (referring to the FBI's flight path map on it's webpage) He replied, somewhat bluntly, I just don’t know. He speculated that it was the product of some ARTC engineers and some Northwest Airlines engineers, using radar and flight recorder information. [I got the sense that he had no faith in that document at all.].
(b) He said (without commenting on how he knew this) that as 305 approached PDX they could have been as much as 20 miles East of V-23. I asked for clarification, was he saying statute miles or nautical miles. His response was “statute miles.” I commented about, in light of that statement, Jerry Thomas’s search in and NE of Dougan Falls would not be so far-fetched. He said Jerry was definitely on target.
Note* Himmelsbach's position of Cooper's jump pushes the jump time to the 20:14-16 time-period.
See an attached map. Thanks to Shutter for help in preparing this map...
